In my every present journey to get back into the swing of things, I am trying to finish projects I had on my desk already. The first being a squad of Deathwing Terminators I started almost a year ago at this point, back when they were actually competitively viable.

Now as much as I would like to bore you with the painting process, I’ve covered my process for several colors, such as the red on the weapons and the blue grey on the bases, in previous posts. The bone armor was done following a painting guide for Deathwing Bladeguard from The Mighty Brush. I have a few of his guides and they are very detailed with precise step by steps and useful visuals and he also periodically updates them; so if you buy the guide you don’t have to worry about it being outdated. They were very useful when I was starting out as it gave me a roadmap I could follow and focus more on technique instead waffling on colors, and these days I usually pick out certain things that work for me in the moment rather than follow the guide wholesale.

The big thing I tried to do for these terminators was once again try my hand at doing oil washes. I intend on practicing with oil washes for the next couple of non-competition pieces because I feel it will be a useful tool to have. With oil washes I can mix a variety of colors and also have more refined recess shading without having to worry about staining as oils can be much more forgiving than acrylic washes.

After I finished applying the bone color on the armor following the suggested colors from Mighty Brush, I sealed it in using a gloss varnish from the Vallejo Mecha line and let it cure overnight. Trying my hand at oil washes again I mixed a roughly equal mix of black and raw umber Winton Oil colors. Afterwards I began thinning it down with Gamblin Gamsol odorless spirits until it reached a consistency similar to what I would airbrush with.

It wasn’t until recently, though, that I learned from a Vince Venturella video that I should actually err to making a thicker wash as this will allow us to make use of the oil’s long cure time and avoid any unwanted residue from having excess spirits.

After applying the oil wash and letting it settle, the problem I was encountering was that the wash seemed grainy and didn’t add the depth and recess shading was looking for. Also, it was still affecting the bone color a little bit in the sense that it was applying a light but noticeable sepia tone to where it spread out and it wasn’t coming out with some q-tips and mineral spirits.

At this point I cut my losses and tried to paint in the bone color as best I could with a brush, and let me tell you, trying to fix a an airbrush layer is practically impossible. Once, I fixed what I could I simply went on with the rest of the paint job, painting in the red, green and metallic details using my usual tried and true methods.

The only detail I had to fiddle with in terms of color were the grey details like the crux terminatus on the pauldron or the wing and parchment details on the shin armor. But this turned out relatively simple as I used a dark basalt grey base and simply added white to make my gradient. Now this approach did take a while as I had to slowly build up my layers so I don’t get that chalkiness you get when using white and going real bright but I think it worked out in the end.

Some key lessons I learned this time about oil washes was to make the wash a little thicker than you think is normal because you can just wipe it away later using mineral spirits. Another is that I am going to finish painting the model first and leave the oil wash for last, because trying to paint around the recess shading I did was an incredibly tedious task and caused an extra source of stress.

Nonetheless it was nice to finally finish the squad and at the time of writing this, I am trying my hand one more time at using oil washes but on a Iron Father Feirros model I did a head swap with to use a primaris tech marine in my Dark Angels army. So you can look forward to a write up on that process where I hopefully have more success.

Till next time.